In Brahmin Capitalism, Noam Maggor dives
into the world of Boston’s Brahmin class and its quest for new avenues of
wealth during the Gilded Age. Maggor illuminates not just Brahmin backgrounds
and investment strategies, but the fractious political debates between Boston
Brahmins and their non-elite opponents both in Boston and on the populist
frontier. This westward pursuit of
wealth produced intense political conflict – and resistance – that decisively
shaped capitalist expansion and resulted in the uneven development of a
national market. Maggor’s approach upends narratives that portray the post-Civil
War expansion of industrial capitalism as an uninterrupted process driven by
railroads and an increasingly powerful federal government. Instead, Maggor views the westward spread of
industrial capitalism and the drive for a national market not as a managerial
“unfolding of modernity” or a natural process, but as a concerted response by
American elites to the post-Civil War decline of the cotton economy.[1]
In Maggor’s telling, the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit in
1869 “signaled the launch, not the culmination, of the effort to consolidate
American dominion over the entire continent.”[2]

Maggor examines
the transition from the antebellum to the post-Civil War economy. He begins with the development of the
Massachusetts-based textile industry in the early nineteenth century by New
England merchants. Peaking
in the 1840s, this thriving Boston-based cotton economy built lavish Beacon
Hill homes and funded civic institutions such as Massachusetts General
Hospital, the Boston Athenaeum, the Lowell Institute, and Harvard College.[3]
Competition from Europe, overproduction, and the 1857 financial panic, however,
spelled potential ruin for Boston’s capitalist elite. Depending on their level
of southern exposure, Boston Brahmins either attempted sectional reconciliation
or redirected their fortunes elsewhere. Many
enlisted in the Union Army. Boston elites reversed their declining fortunes
after the Civil War by shifting their investments westward. Henry Lee Higginson
gained control of copper mining ventures in Michigan while Charles F. Adams Jr.
developed the stockyards of Kansas City. Thomas Jefferson Coolidge squeezed
profits out of declining New England mills and struggling workers, gaining
“quick capital” which he then transferred to Western investment.[4]
Far from dropping out of society and making way for the nouveau rich, as
Richard Hofstadter famously argued, Maggor’s dynamic, pragmatic, and determined
“old-money” elites sought to reinvent themselves in the face of a changing
economy. For Maggor, “men of capital,”
not energetic grassroots entrepreneurs, “became key agents in the formation of
the new continental order.”[5]

Maggor describes
how these Brahmins turned Boston, along with New York and Philadelphia, into the
financial hubs of the new capitalist order. As non-elite Bostonians witnessed the
transformation of their city into a financial center, many opposed the flight of
capital from the local economy. Democratically elected urban leaders from the
working or lower middle classes embraced a vision of “producerism” that collided
with that of the elites and fought bitterly with them over metropolitan
boundaries and government finance. Echoing the work of sociologist Saskia
Sassen, Maggor illuminates the links between the political structure of cities
and the formation of a national market. He shows how elites both destroyed
financial boundaries with their capital flight and reinforced social boundaries
at the local level that preserved their elite status. Hoping to improve housing
for Boston workers, expand water and sewer lines, and draw on the taxes of
wealthy neighbors in Brookline, elected officials pursued an “annexation
movement” with surrounding towns. Elites resisted these actions by developing a
language of property rights, tradition, and localism. In 1891, Mayor Nathan
Matthews, the first Brahmin to capture the seat, intensified such local tax
battles by advancing a narrow, land-based concept of property taxation to
shield from public scrutiny financial assets, such as securities, that
constituted an increasing share of elite wealth.

In addition to
pursuing a finance-friendly vision of urban government and taxation, Boston
Brahmins also sought to police physical economic development in the city in
ways that created and maintained elite urban environments. In 1877, the Massachusetts
Charitable Mechanic Association, Boston’s organization of craftsmen and small
manufactures petitioned to hold their triennial exhibition on the Boston
Common. Elite residents of the newly developed and fashionable Back Bay
neighborhood resisted, portraying the mechanical exhibition in “a space meant
for quiet recreation as offensive and crass.”[6]
Boston Brahmins likewise opposed the growth of manufacturing in South and East
Boston, and “annexed” areas as Roxbury and Dorchester, resisting capital
development close to home even as they shifted their own capital to the western
territories. They sought to preserve Boston’s character (as they defined it),
as a cultural and financial center where elites could gather and create “the
common culture and tight-knit social bonds that enabled them to mobilize in
concert and preside over national development.”[7]

From
urban politics centered on the usage of public space, metropolitan boundaries,
and municipal taxes, Maggor moves his readers to the territorial politics
surrounding the constitutional conventions and institutional formation in the
West. He highlights the similar political struggle against eastern finance
between two groups historians previously have treated separately: the urban
democratic machines and the frontier populists. Though admittedly dependent on
eastern finance, Maggor’s settler politicians were far from parochial. Territorial
democratic leaders sought to check corporate control when they could through
corporate charters, legal regimes, and industrial regulation. These often-difficult political struggles
produced “an uneven regulatory landscape that national corporations would have
struggled to transverse.” Eastern capital, in other words, did not produce a
“flat” national or world market, but a “complex new geography, an institutional
patchwork,” the jurisdictional unevenness of which was itself the result of
popular struggles to restrain capitalism’s untrammeled march.[8]

Maggor
encourages us to see westward expansion from the perspective of private actors
and redirects our attention to the urban and interregional dynamics at play
during this pivotal moment of capitalist development. Nevertheless, it remains unclear
why these Brahmins selected the West for investment. Why did these economically
mobile elites with ancestral experience in the merchant trade not seek
opportunities farther away along existing trade routes? Although Maggor seems
to view the decentralized state-level regulations as an obstacle for national
corporations, this very essential element of the American political economy –
federalism – and its multiple layers of governance arguably propelled capital
flight across the continent. Federalism,
in other words, was both an obstacle to be surmounted and a resource to be
exploited. Like Martin Sklar and James Livingston before him, Maggor demonstrates
how pragmatic capitalists continually updated their strategies to traverse the ever-shifting
landscape of a rapidly developing country. Capital did not always get what it
wanted, but it took what it could get in various locales, and, crucially,
generated resistance as it did. Maggor offers powerful lessons for our contemporary
gilded age, as democratic forces seek to contain the seemingly unstoppable
march of technological and financial oligarchs. Brahmin Capitalism should be read by any student of capitalism,
urban history, and Western history. Several of the book’s chapters could easily
make their way into undergraduate courses and help displace the persistent
notion that laissez-faire ideology dominated the period.

Essays in History

Established in 1954, Essays in History is the annual publication of the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. EiH publishes original, peer-reviewed articles in all fields of historical inquiry, as well as reviews of the most recent scholarship. EiH serves as a resource to students, teachers, researchers, and enthusiasts of historical studies.